Sailortowns were districts in ports where sailors visited, often lived and were entertained. However, while historians have made significant strides in exploring sailors in merchant ports, naval sailortowns have largely been overlooked. It will be argued here that in the English naval towns of Portsmouth and Plymouth, sailortown exhibited a sense of ‘Otherness’ and a subaltern resilience to the cultural hegemony of civic progress and modernity during the second half of the nineteenth century. Those living in naval sailortowns were geographically and culturally marginalized from the centres of economic and political power and their relationship with the civic and naval authorities was one which varied between compromise and resistance.

The history of walking in the city has long been neglected, and the existing scholarship is largely concerned with rioting, flânerie or urban geography. This article aims to detect the behavioural patterns of pedestrian traffic in the late nineteenth century through a close study of the methods of pickpockets in London streets, with information gleaned from trial reports and writings on pickpockets. By analysing the most common ways in which pickpockets operated, as described in numerous accounts, we can see how they adapted to nineteenth-century pedestrian norms, and through this method acquire a rough outline of what pedestrian traffic looked like, and thus how urban dwellers living in a critical historical period adapted and reacted to urban conditions on an everyday level. The evidence shows that pedestrian traffic through the century remained highly interactive, and that the modern aspects of cities identified in theories of civilizing or impoverishment of the public realm had a very limited impact at this time.

In Denmark, the first actual towns can be dated to the eighth and ninth centuries. The establishment of towns became more significant in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in connection with the state-building process, and these towns were distinctly consumer towns serving as administrative, religious and military centres. From 1200 to 1350 Denmark, similar to the German area, underwent considerable urbanization; a large number of market towns were created, and in contrast to the older ones they were mercantile towns. Denmark thus clearly became the most urbanized country in Scandinavia. As Copenhagen grew in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the urban system decisively changed its character in the direction of a primate system. The characteristics of the primate system are particularly distinct within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Denmark, but less pronounced if the entire monarchy is included in the period in which Denmark was a conglomerate state. The institutional conditions must in general be attributed considerable importance in explaining Danish urban development. Thus, Denmark is one of the countries where town privileges were of great significance until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Architectural historian P. Reyner Banham (1922–88) is widely known for his numerous writings on the modern built environment, including the book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). In the BBC television film Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (Julian Cooper, 1972), he concretized his earlier insights about the importance of mobility in the Southern California metropolis by employing the proclivity of the cinematic medium to represent movement. While traditional notions of the urban icon commonly understand it as a static monument or landmark, in these two works Banham challenges the suitability of this view to a city as inflected by automobility as Los Angeles and proposes the motorway and the experience of driving as its most characteristic iconic forms.

The medieval period is often regarded as part of the statistical ‘Dark Ages’ in English history before the nineteenth century. The figures which are available were mostly collected for immediate administrative or fiscal purposes far removed from the future needs of historians and by a state lacking the comprehensive administrative organization of a census-taking modern government. Medieval man in particular is usually thought to have had little concept of the meaning of high numbers. In 1371, for instance, the English parliament believed that there were 40,000 parishes in the country when in fact there were less than 9,000. Again, ‘when the pope was assured by his advisers that the Black Death had cost the lives of 42, 836, 486 throughout the world, or the losses in Germany were estimated at 1, 244, 434, what was meant was that an awful lot of people had died’. Estimates of total populations have of course been a famous source of controversy. ‘Medieval man like classical man before him was little interested in figures. Neither showed any desire to formulate a precise estimate of population, and when figures were called for they hazarded only the wildest guesses.’ Even for England, where more promising evidence survives than for any other country, Professor Postan concluded that it was not possible to measure the total size of the population at any given point of time. For 1086 for example, estimates of total population could have a ‘heroic’ margin of error of up to 150 per cent. Historians, he decided, should rather be concerned with the dynamics of medieval population than with global numbers.

The inauguration of New Delhi in 1931 represented a complex vision of the late colonial state where liberal political reforms intended to pacify Indians simultaneously bound them more closely to the British Empire. These conciliatory reforms focused Indian attention on provincial local self-government while the centre remained firmly in British hands. New Delhi, as the pre-eminent symbol of this imperial centre, crucially disseminated this double narrative of promised liberation and continued colonial dependency. The new capital may have projected imperial power and permanence, as many scholars have noted, but it also symbolized the underlying strands that connected British political reform with the reinforcement and reaffirmation of continued British rule.

This article focuses on the role of gender in walking by studying thousands of street photographs taken between 1890 and 1989 in the city of Turku. Analysis of the photographs presents female pedestrians as the most numerous and continuously large group on the urban streets and reveals gendered patterns and practices of walking. Furthermore, it showcases how female mobility patterns were ignored and harmed by the car-centred city planning and traffic solutions of the mid- and late twentieth century. At the same time, women's walking appears as a central enabler of the fragile technological system that is motorized urban transport.

We currently know civic societies as a widespread part of the amenity lobby, yet their history is little explored. Focusing on the emergence and growth of civic societies before 1960, this article examines some of that history. The first section provides a background context, linking civic groups to shifting ideas about architecture and space, and to reform movements of the nineteenth century. The second section explores the growth in numbers of associations and their memberships. The third section develops a discussion of the ideas and activities of societies, focusing particularly on their articulation of social and spatial interconnection, their use of a prescriptive urban aesthetic and their political influence.

This article concentrates on the Kurdish quarter of Damascus and investigates the relationship between communal/ethnic identity, spatial organization and the socio-political structures of the city. It challenges the notion of quarter as an ‘ethnic cluster’ by examining historical processes of integration of the Kurdish community in the body politic of Damascus. In the colonial period the emergence of new arenas of public action for the Kurdish community are analysed with reference to the emergence of new ideas of class and community.

Though the phrase ‘public services’ is a nineteenth-century invention, which was supported by a developed rhetoric of political economy, this article shows that the concept, practice and supply of such services could also be found in the medieval city. It specifically analyses three areas of urban service provision: jurisprudence and legal security, infrastructure and finally health care and poor relief. Although the available sources tend to stress the involvement of municipal authorities in providing public services, it turns out that in fact the furnishing of services was highly multi-layered. In all three areas studied, a wide range of public and private institutions offered services to specific groups within late medieval urban society. In contrast to what the notion of ‘public services’ lets us presume, however, public services in the medieval city were not available to all inhabitants. Instead, the provision of services was usually quite restrictive, and targeted particular groups in society.

The creation of a colonial police force in Tanganyika after the First World War and its elaboration over the next four decades is described, as are its role in the attempted assertion of urban order and its relations with the Dar es Salaam public. The force was a central component in the colonial state's efforts to assert control over the urban arena. Lacking both resources and legitimacy it was only partially effective in this regard, with intermittent enforcement of colonial legislation being the norm. More concerted efforts to supervise the urban African population at a time of rapid urban growth in the post-Second World War period led to a deterioration in – already poor – police-public relations, which served further to undermine colonial authority.

This article argues that the Edwardian municipal park represents a significant transition from the highly regulated and formal space of the Victorian park. It takes as a case-study Heaton Park in Manchester purchased in late 1901 and suggests that this park represented a transition from a Victorian people's park to an Edwardian citizen's park in which each visitor accessed facilities and amenities appropriate to their individual or group leisure interests. It addresses the comparative neglect of the Edwardian park by urban historians and suggests the importance of the emerging concepts of citizenship and social responsibility.

The retreat from bold reconstruction planning in Britain's blitzed cities is now well established, although there are two notable exceptions: Coventry and Plymouth. While the circumstances in Coventry have been fully researched, the narrative in Plymouth remains untold. The aim of this article is therefore to evaluate the main formal measures required to embark on the comprehensive redevelopment of Plymouth's heavily blitzed core area and whether, despite Whitehall's failure to deliver the necessary legal and administrative powers in a timely and co-ordinated manner, the city maintained its faith in bold plans and planners.

Focusing on Liverpool in the early 1980s, this article argues that localized approaches to Cold War cities can help us understand the impact of national nuclear policy on cultures of local government and everyday life. After an articulation of cultural politics in the early 1980s, this article suggests that nuclear cultures that existed in Liverpool were shaped by ideas and assumptions discursively reinforced at both a national and local level.

This article uses the concept of ‘improvement’ to examine the experiences of five burghs in Angus – Dundee, Montrose, Forfar, Brechin and Arbroath – in the later Georgian era. Designed as a contribution to British history in a comparative sense, and using the five burghs as case studies, it seeks to identity distinctively Scottish, as well as common, British elements in Scottish urbanization during a crucial phase in its development. Existing studies of Scottish urban society in this period focus very heavily on the impact of industrialization on large towns and cities, especially Glasgow. Partly as a result, other themes have been neglected or obscured. A second main aim, therefore, is to offer an alternative framework for understanding the development and experiences of the smaller towns in which most of the Scottish urban population lived prior to 1830.

Focusing on the example of municipal interventions in defence, this article proposes to evaluate the role of cities and towns in Cold War policies. It discusses how, in the early 1980s, residents in Great Britain, New Zealand, West Germany and the USA claimed responsibility for defence and (dis)armament policies in the name of their respective city or home town. To justify this claim, protagonists not only portrayed urban settlements as probable targets of nuclear war. They also highlighted cities and towns as concrete places and drew attention to locality as a scale that might bear specific potentials for participation and empowerment. Yet a closer analysis of such initiatives in the four countries reveals that municipal activities for peace and disarmament developed in far more complex spatial relations than references to the ‘local’ as a scale of involvement might imply.

The article presents the short urban history of Tel Aviv as a case-study for critical readings in urban planning. Focusing on Patrick Geddes’ celebrated plan for the city (1925) and its various interpretations along the years, the main claim made in the article is that when present planners are confronted with a past which does not suit current needs, history is contested, or reinvented entirely. The appreciation of Geddes’ plan over the years always reflected the city's contemporary image and its planners’ attitudes, which initially reflected the pioneering spirits of the city's Zionist creation. The plan was later blamed for the city's deterioration; and finally celebrated again, alongside the city's new found architectural heritage and urban spirit.

Historians have largely ignored the tens of thousands of landlords, and hundreds of thousands of tenants in early modern London. Society was not organized to readily reveal their relation and magnitudes, so the issue must be approached from a variety of directions. Modern stereotypes of both were well formulated by that period, despite the intricacy in and frequent dual role of landlord and tenant played by the same persons. Property holdings were dispersed among a variety landlords, so tenants faced no stranglehold over dwellings, while landlords in the main used rental holdings to supplement their basic incomes.

This article examines the role played by local councillors in constructing new housing in Scotland during the inter-war period. Rather than view local authorities as simply the objective agency of central government's ambitions to construct council houses, we argue that the self-interest and motivations of councillors have to be recognized as significant factors in this process. It is argued also that the concerns of private landlords were neither ignored nor sacrificed in the rush to build new housing. Rather, given that councils remained dominated by local business men, many of whom were private landlords, councillors acted in ways to protect their own material and class interests. In so doing, they consciously, if implicitly, shaped the social geography of twentieth-century Scotland.

The Guild of Help was formed at Bradford in 1904 with the idea of introducing a new, more community-based, approach to deal with the increasingly important problem of poverty. It emerged to overcome the failures of charity and the threat of increased state intervention, seeking instead to get all the community to take responsibility for the poor. The movement spread rapidly and soon became a major constituent of voluntary urban relief in Britain. Yet, in the end, its community approach failed, largely because solving the problem of poverty was well beyond its means, and intent, but also because it was unable to draw the churches, the working classes and charities into working with the well-regulated system of help for the poor which it envisaged.